Versão em português
(With the collaboration of my sister, my brothers and friends, during many evenings spent on conversations, while drinking coffee with milk, accompanied by bread with butter 😊... Ah! The good old times)
For Catholicism, Creation is compatible with Darwin's Theory of
Evolution – several Popes
have already pronounced on the subject and this "accommodation"
between religion (catholic) and science is progressing more and more. It is
possible to debate this topic, in this sense, based on conclusions of thinkers
in this sphere of knowledge, without harming logic.
I know that I do not have a great erudition to explain all the doctrine, and even if I had it, I could not
summarize, in a modest text, the reflections and the theories accumulated for
millennia by inspired thinkers. Anyway, I’m doing this mental exercise for
myself, because there are many questions lying around without definitive
answers. When something intrigues me – though I'm rooted in faith – writing
helps me a lot to put my thoughts and feelings in order. If it can be useful to
others, it will be even better.
Often we wonder why God, in His infinite goodness, does not come to help
those who suffer.
If we then, who are not so good, we sympathize and try to alleviate the
suffering of people, especially those we love, how God, who loves us so much,
does not come to help us? Considering this principle, many people come to
believe that God does not exist and that the universe in which we live is a
result of a random event.
To a certain extent, with
the help of the "devil's advocate" technique, we can purge our thoughts
of many futilities. I like to use this method, it is very useful. For those who
do not know the origin of the term "devil's advocate", the link at
the end of the text explains very well [1].
- First of all, we cannot forget that our intelligence has just emerged,
organized in thoughts, minimally, in precarious and fragile neuronal
connections, during a painful saga of the evolution on this life that we know,
in which we scarcely succeed in keeping the body upright against gravity, in a
condition we are still depending on many chemical and physical reactions, and
so on. It is impossible to understand everything, to explain everything through
our perception of things.
- That is true. I always try to remember it, when I let myself be
carried away by deductions and doubts.
Why does suffering exist? Suffering is a consequence of the "Original Sin", according
to the explanation of the Church. In our computer age, I like to make an
analogy between the original sin and a computer "bug". Those who
often use computers have probably seen such an accident happen. Sometimes a bug
can cause a computer to crash, and it can only be reactivated if we restart it.
When the problem is more serious, even after being restarted, the computer does
not operate at its full and normal capacity. It will present some
"suffering". I dare say (how can I do it?), I've already adopted
another analogy – hope theologians forgive me – comparing the
"reboot" of the computer with the "Big Bang".
The universe was restarted
after the original sin, with all the suffering we find in it, without its full
and normal capacity... Voilà.
- This analogy is going too far away from what is said in the Holy
Scriptures, isn't it? In the book of Genesis…
- Not at all. According to the story of the book of Genesis, everything
was alright, until Adam and Eve (iconic representation of that humanity)
disobeyed. After this error, they suffered a great decadence and the whole
system of life collapsed with them. Things have become as we learn in our
"science", in the way matter evolves – and what appalling suffering until a thinking being
appears! – in this painful process that
favors and leads to finitude. The various elements of the material of which the
universe is made – matter/energy – rearrange in the construction of different
types of bodies, systems... These formations are then lost and others are
formed, to be lost, then, to their turn, using a pool of self-recyclable
material – it's like an "infinite loop", a vicious circle!
- Still about the book of Genesis, how to give it credibility? There are
other similar stories told by other peoples. Would not it be a legend
literarily written as if it were something considered true?
- I think that all these texts are fruit of inspired reflections. In the
same way that philosophers, mathematicians, physicists of our time get on board
to join the studies of their predecessors, so do writers of the Old Testament,
in a language that often seems or really is allegorical and poetic – it's been
a long time ago, the way of seeing science was different.
Without digressing too much, the challenge of my
interrogations here, as I said at the beginning, and I put as a starting point
for reasoning, is the goodness of God in the Catholic "tutorial"...
Whereas only God is good (words of Jesus Christ, Matthew 19: 16-22), therefore
no one else is good, that is, no one has ever had the experience of being good.
So what we call good and bad has nothing to do with the goodness of God. Expressions we use, such as "God is good," "God is Love," are what we have to articulate words within the limits of our anatomy, so to speak, but they are far from accurate.
- In our human context, the duality of good and evil has gradations and
is perceived and evaluated in a variety of ways from one community to another.
We are very primitive, still in the phase of formulating what is good and what
is not.
Nobody can be entirely good
or entirely bad. After all, these different intensities of goodness or evilness
are variants of suffering we present. We can have more or less goodness at some
point...
- Yes... the difference must be between to BE and to HAVE. Only God IS
good. We manage to HAVE degrees of goodness.
All suffering makes us unhappy. There is also a gradation here, a threshold. Some
sufferings bother us more than others. The suffering of others also disturbs us
at varying intensities. Finally, we live in a mess difficult to understand, a
context sometimes difficult to accept. We are not perfect.
It is impossible to
understand a perfect God, even to imagine what pure goodness is, based on what
we call ‘good’, among us. We do not know what it is. We are unable to imagine
God. In the words of Saint Hilary of Poitiers: “Let us confess by our silence that words cannot describe him; let sense
admit that it is foiled in the attempt to apprehend, and reason in the effort
to define.” (De Trinitate, Hilary of Poitiers)
- Suffering is in everything in our dimension, on greater or smaller
scale. We understand that if God came to help us every time someone suffers
from cancer, every time there is a war, it would be like treating a leaf at the
end of a tree branch, while it is the root that is rotten. Why not cure the
root, then?
- According to the "tutorial", the root has already been
treated, with the Resurrection of Christ,
overcoming all that degeneration leading to death.
It is up to us to follow
Jesus, the incarnation of the God's Word, who has suffered, died and risen from
the dead, to save us from this defect that has remained at our root since the
famous "original sin". And, according to the experts, this Redeemer
Event is valid for everyone, before, during and after the period during which
Jesus lived among us. They are inspired and based on many clues and evidences –
a theme that leads to long narratives, and I will not try to write about it
now.
- If God is pure goodness,
then He cannot have created evil. How, then, did evil appear
to humanity and provoke its failure and decay? Through another element of
Creation? But where does it come from, if God did not create evil? Did He
create evil? In addition to giving free will to his creatures, did he make
available to them an option different from what was good? This story is full of
holes, it does not sound right.
- Of course, it doesn’t sound right! We are not able to explain what is
happening to us today, how can we explain all this? It is not more advanced to
imagine a completely random universe emanating from eternal energy... Or born
from nothingness? What is nothingness? This idea reminds me of a backward phase
of science in which scientists believed in "spontaneous generation",
considering the spontaneous formation of certain living beings from organic
matter, inorganic matter or a combination of both – larvae of mosquitoes that
could arise spontaneously from a piece of meat. The comparison is grotesque,
but quite valid.
- And if there was no original
sin? That is, and if God created our universe the way we know it, with this
evolution of matter and energy, so that the conditions would be there to give
life to the thinking being? Gradually, this being would acquire degrees of
"goodness" until it was configured to receive and assimilate His Word
– Jesus – and with Him he would acquire the most difficult "goodness"
– the eternity.
- Possible... Because the idea of God creating a perfect universe that
gave birth to the human being, a "good being" like Him – who would then be a clone of
God – seems to me as grotesque as that of the larvae appearing spontaneously
from a piece of meat. On the other hand, if the universe created was not
perfect, it continued not being so, but in evolution...
Enough, for now... I think
our intelligence is not able to understand our origins, yet! There are still a
lot of studies missing... a lot to develop! And, probably, we will not succeed.
For this very reason, I want to engage in the festive atmosphere that
celebrates the birth of Jesus, whose legacy, with His Word of Love and the evidences of His wonders, is
within our reach. We need to learn more from His teachings.
May the Lord always be
praised!
Merry Christmas to everyone!
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